Blog Love Omega Glee: And This Year's Award For The Biggest Lie Goes To . . . (3 December 2012)

Working the night shift as the lone cashier at Mart Mart, Francine fills in the time between customers reading the magazines on the rack in front of her cash register. Most of them are gossip rags and
detail which celebrity is cheating on a spouse, cheating on a contract, losing weight, losing fans, doing drugs, doing another celebrity, secretly gay, secretly straight, and so on. Francine notices that the celebrity magazines publish basically the same text every week, just changing the names in the stories. She flips through an issue of Carl's Celebrity Cascade, which lists the world's sexiest television news reporters ("We'd listen to Sharon Reed read the telephone book just to hear that velvet voice"), and wonders what to think of a culture that doesn't pay as much attention to the news the reporters report as it does to the sexiness of the reporters. And the news they report is often little more than propaganda and official lies anyway. Perhaps people are right then to focus on the reporter's physical attributes since everything coming out of that sexy mouth is little more than an adult version of a fairy tale and has little resemblance to the world outside the television. Francine thinks of A.J. Liebling, who once proposed that American newspapers give an award to the newspaper that told the biggest lie in the past year. Today, Francine decides, the award could be opened up to all media categories including television networks, movie studios, radio stations, and Web sites. It's hard to tell fact from fiction and news from opinion anymore. Everything's blurred, and then buried under a steady diet of junk news like the stories about celebrities, which are fun but irrelevant to the average citizen, only serving to distract her or him from news that matters like the rich looting the public treasury. Francine realizes that under such a steady barrage of propaganda, it's no wonder that her little blog devoted to truth seems a bit insane to the person used to reading Carl's Celebrity Cascade or the daily newspaper.

She sighs. Maybe she ought to give up doing her blog, like Jake did, and they can just concentrate on doing their new blog together. She wouldn't have to carry the world on her back anymore and she could just gripe about her miserable job instead. Of course, right now, the most miserable thing about it is having to fight to stay awake to ring up someone buying groceries at 3 in the morning. She flips to an article about Kitty O'Couscous ("She may not have won the presidency, but this patriotic porn star won our hearts. What will she do now? Or should that be 'whom'?"), but before she can read further, an older white man wearing a Cleaveland Caucasians baseball hat rolls his cart up. Francine notices that his cart is empty. The old man says, "Do you guys sell anything that isn't made in China? I thought the U.S. government bailed you out, and this is the thanks we get?"

Francine says, "Yes. I mean yes, we sell things that aren't made in China, I don't know . . ."

The man doesn't wait for her to elaborate, and says, "I don't understand how I could have fought the communist Chinese in Korea and now here they are dumping their crap in middle America, and I'm supposed to be OK with that."

"I can get the night manager if you want to speak to him."

"Ah, wouldn't do a darn bit of good. He's probably a pinko anyway. Here."

The man hands Francine a coupon: "Buy one Hershey's Bar, Get one free!"

"At least I know those are still made in America. I've been to the factory."

"This coupon isn't good here."

"What do you mean?"

"It's for Food Wigwam. This is Mart Mart."

"What?"

"It's for the wrong store. You're in Mart Mart."

"Well, I may not know where the bleep I am, but I sure as heck know I ain't in America anymore," the old man says and shoves his shopping cart into the wall.

Blog Love Omega Glee is a novel by Wred Fright about two bloggers who fall in love while the world falls apart, which is being serialized on his blog. To start reading from the beginning or read another installment, please visit Blog Love Omega Glee Central on WredFright.Com. If you like what you've read, or you've read all of Blog Love Omega Glee and want more Fright, then please read his first novel.